Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.

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Monthly Archives: December 2010

“I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That’s not a good thing.”

Unwilling to implement ballistics fingerprinting or do anything else to reduce ~10,000 yearly gun murders due to paranoid fear/hopeful fantasy that when big guvmint comes to take our freedoms (aka guns) we will use our pistols and our grandfathers’ .30-06es to successfully repel the local SWAT team, the ATF, the national guard and the US Army.

So if I drink Heineken I can be a “Tiger” and prey on “prize” women who’re just sitting around waiting for someone to pull the right move. Does that mean that if I drink a different beer I’m allowed to see women as something other than objects to be conquered?

In case the video is a little too subtle, the YouTube description spells it out more blatantly:

She’s heard every line. She’s seen every move. Until now. Watch the video and share your go-to move.

This is gross on so many levels: objectifying the woman, making relationships about “conquering” someone with the perfect gesture that forces them to love you, pressuring guys to be more “alpha,” making everything a competition, etc. I need a shower after watching this shit.

Saw somebody on facebook ranting about government taking away guns and the New World Order and this and that. By the way: apparently the solution to Columbine, Virginia Tech etc. is to let high school and college students bring guns on campus.

It made me think of this old speech, which is pretty clearly about peace and the further establishment of democracy. If there’s any hidden message, it’s one about the US having less pull at the UN in recent decades. (“a credible United Nations” etc) Read More

…only us ever-fallible humans. Innocent until proven guilty, but these quotes would seem to fit Assange’s character if accurate:

[Miss A’s] account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she “tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again”. Miss A told police that she didn’t want to go any further “but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far”, and so she allowed him to undress her.

According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had “done something” with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.

As for the second woman, Miss W,

The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when “he agreed unwillingly to use a condom”.

Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

And again we see the fruitlessness of latching onto the hero of the day. Perhaps it’s unfair to extrapolate a violation of social barriers from Assange’s obvious disregard for electronic ones, but he has certainly come across as someone who feels the rules do not apply. At any rate, my point here is that the guilt or innocence of Assange in these sexual assault cases — though clearly significant at the individual level — has virtually nothing to do with the idea and implementation of Wikileaks as a whole. At this point Assange is basically a figurehead, and regardless of any particular canonization or demonization attempts that might be directed at him personally, the genie is out of the bottle as far as these online leaks go. It isn’t particularly difficult to set up a Wikileaks mirror, and it’s only a matter of time before other websites of the sort begin showing up.

Regardless of one’s feelings on the idea of online document dump sites like Wikileaks, focusing on Assange is pointless. The guy is a grandstander of the highest order and the cult of personality growing around him is deserving of scrutiny; true. But equally questionable is the idea that anything — whatsoever — that could potentially be done to him could eliminate the existence of Wikileaks and websites of its type. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Assange is background noise — the longterm implications of the technology he has propagated is the issue.

Well DADT repeal passed. I don’t really have anything to say that doesn’t boil down to “FUCK YEAH THIS SHIT IS AWESOME” and “I’ll never understand what it’s like having to live that kind’ve lie” so instead omgomgomg gay-positive funny hat party!

How bout this rainbow party hat?

...or perhaps this one's better?

I think I like this one best.

Regardless: suck it, fundies. And congrats (if that’s the right word… is that the right word?) to the LGBT community.